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What a Journalist Isn't

I'm sick and tired of the abuse journalists are getting at the moment. They don't deserve it, at least real journalists don't - ...

26 May 2012

Olympic Challenge

Some things in life are self-evident. Quantum cats aside, you can't be both alive and dead. You can't be in a committed relationship whilst also looking for love. And you can't, at one and the same time, be both a journalist and a publicist.

Yet this is the strange position the BBC has found itself in with the Olympic Games coming to London this summer. Getting the balance right is going to be a real challenge for the corporation.

16 May 2012

Proud and Humbled

UPDATED 18 MAY

I'm delighted and honoured to have won the BBC Developing Talent 'Achievement' award for 2012.

I know how much great work goes on across the region in all the training institutions with which the BBC has partnership arrangements. I know, and greatly respect, the previous winners of the Achievement award so it's a real privilege to have been judged worthy of the accolade.

This isn't the time to get on a soapbox and start haranging my readers. It's a time to be humble and grateful and to say thank you to friends and talented colleagues who've made it possible over the past 20 years - including the managers at Leeds Trinity University College who indulge an unconventional and maverick tutor who wakes up every day surprised he's supposed to be a 'university academic' with a scary title like 'Associate Principal Lecturer'. In reality I'm just a radio enthusiast who got too old for the front line and had a lucky break into training.

15 May 2012

An Ode to Salford

I never thought it would happen.

My honest impression when I first saw the architect's drawings for the BBC's new home in Salford in (about) 2005 was that the project would go the same way as the Leeds supertram and the Bradford 'Louvre' pyramid. For the record, we ended up with some tarted-up bus stops and a fountain respectively. Major investment is too good for the North.

My hard hat tour in 2010, of what was by then being marketed as MediaCityUK, (gotta be cool - no punctuation) at the Radio Academy festival still failed to banish the cynicism. It was a building site, for goodness' sake, and it's hard to get excited about concrete dust and fluorescent jackets.

Today I went back. It's happened, and I'm still gobsmacked by what I saw.

07 May 2012

It's Called Democracy

I had a good day on Friday; my Leeds Trinity postgrads were all employed by the BBC as stringers or runners at election counts across West Yorkshire, so I took the opportunity to volunteer for a shift myself. I ended up as a runner-come-reporter for Radio Leeds assisting at Leeds Town Hall. It felt so liberating to be back in harness, working on a developing story.

I've covered a fair few elections in my time.